Chapter Five: The Emerging Metropolitan Political Ecology of France
Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot and Jefferey M. Sellers
In France, as in other European countries, the metropolitan transformation poses a challenge to generations of analyses of political behaviour and culture. Through most of the twentieth century, from the analyses of politics under the Third Republic (Siegfried 1913), accounts of territorial influences on voting have centred around either longstanding regional traditions or the divide between urban and rural. At the same time, periurban development has absorbed more and more of the countryside surrounding the largest urban concentrations such as Paris and Lyon, and even smaller regional cities across the country (Julien 2003; Cavailhès et al. 2002; Péguy 2000). A growing majority of the French electorate now lives in extended, interconnected regions divided into localities with distinctive patterns of consumption, employment, social homogeneity and cultural practices (Hoffmann-Martinot 2005). This transformation has immense implications for patterns of electoral participation, and explains much of the new patterns of partisanship that have emerged in France since the 1980s.
In this chapter we examine metropolitan and local sources of the patterns of voter turnout and partisanship that have emerged. The analysis focuses on results at the communal level from the first-round presidential election of 2002, and the first-round results from municipal elections the previous year. As multilevel analyses reveal, the local and metropolitan contexts of voting account for variations in both turnout and partisanship beyond what demographic composition can explain. Interests, values and cultural orientations linked to metropolitan places help to account for the success of the Right in national elections under Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, and the surprise second-place showing of the extreme right under Jean-Marie le Pen in 2002. Similar local and metropolitan influences have shaped turnout in elections at the municipal and national levels, and the relation between them.
French metropolitan areas: demographic and spatial dimensions
Since the 1970s, metropolitan areas in France have grown continuously. In France, state intervention played a direct role in the shaping of mid-century suburbanisation, as the French state directed new development outwards from central cities into high-rise housing estates (grands ensembles) and new cities created in the Paris region (ZUP – Zones à Urbaniser en Priorité). From the 1980s, metropolitanisation proceeded predominantly from private inputs and individual choices. As in the United States, subsidies for homeownership and public programs, such as the construction of new highways, offered incentives for middle class families to move out of the central cities into the urban periphery.
The resulting flight of middle and upper class urban residents from the central cities has departed in significant ways from the U.S. example. From the 1950s, the redevelopment of historical and cultural amenities in French central cities has reinforced their economic drawing power for well-to-do residents. As a result, cross-national comparisons have shown that socio-economic disparities between central cities and their suburbs in France remain more limited than in the US, and that concentrations of disadvantage are often most dramatic in the near suburbs that have built high-rise housing estates (Hoffmann-Martinot 2005). In the metropolitan periphery, following a pattern of ‘rurbanisation’ (Julien 2003; Cavailhès et al. 2002), new housing continues to cluster around the networks of small villages that have long characterised rural France.
New data sources available since 2000, including the first publicly available electronic database with wealth indicators by commune, have made it possible to investigate metropolitan spatial patterns and their electoral consequences systematically. This novel analysis employs a new categorisation of municipalities by the French National Statistical Office (INSEE) that uses commuting and labour market patterns rather than built-up areas to designate metropolitan regions. The resulting 42 ‘urbanised areas’ (aires urbaines) with populations over 200,000 provide the first definitions of metropolitan regions comparable to those in the United States, Canada and other developed countries. In 1999, 77 per cent of the French population lived in these areas, up from 73 per cent in 1990.
The unusual geopolitical fragmentation of French local governments has made municipalities especially helpful units for capturing the variations in political participation and partisan mobilisation within these metropolitan areas. With few exceptions, the boundaries between municipalities have remained fixed since the commune was established as a unit of municipal government in the eighteenth century. Following metropolitanisation, central cities generally encompass only a small proportion of the metropolitan area. The remaining local governments are among the most fragmented in the world (Hoffmann-Martinot 2005). Many communes on the periphery of metropolitan regions number only a few hundred residents, or fewer. These variations ensure that communal ecological data will capture a large portion of the variation in residential contexts within French metropolitan areas, and may even promote patterns of residential sorting that correspond to municipal boundaries.
Despite the particularities of French metropolitanisation, communes in these metropolitan regions sort into types broadly comparable to those in other developed countries. Cluster analysis confirmed the categories from the hierarchical procedure of the IMO protocol.[1] The types consisted of Urban concentrations combine high social hardship and immigrant populations with attraction for higher status groups, housing the second highest proportion (35 per cent) of adult residents with a post-secondary education among the types (Table 5.1).
Table 5.1: Characteristics of town types
Type of commune / Population1999 / Inhabitants
/ km² / Post-secondary education (%) / Median income
/ person / Home owners (%) / Unemployed (%) / Population born abroad (%) / Workers working
& residing in
same commune (%) / N
Urban concentrations / Mean / 187546 / 3900 / 35 / 9017 / 36 / 18 / 11 / 65 / 50
S.d. / 308749 / 2978 / 9 / 1486 / 8 / 4 / 6 / 14
Affluent suburbs / Mean / 6992 / 1407 / 50 / 13575 / 73 / 7 / 10 / 15 / 539
S.d. / 11797 / 3044 / 8 / 1745 / 14 / 2 / 6 / 6
Poor
minority / Mean / 18956 / 2420 / 28 / 8561 / 54 / 16 / 18 / 26 / 331
S.d. / 20844 / 3149 / 7 / 1454 / 16 / 4 / 5 / 10
Poor non-minority / Mean / 4398 / 558 / 24 / 8438 / 67 / 15 / 6 / 21 / 843
S.d. / 6412 / 891 / 8 / 1182 / 15 / 4 / 4 / 9
Middle class suburbs / Mean / 2822 / 354 / 31 / 10135 / 78 / 8 / 6 / 17 / 2298
S.d. / 4361 / 725 / 7 / 1185 / 11 / 2 / 4 / 7
Low density suburbs / Mean / 441 / 35 / 27 / 9152 / 80 / 9 / 5 / 20 / 2713
S.d. / 450 / 16 / 9 / 1552 / 9 / 4 / 4 / 9
Total / Mean / 4548 / 463 / 30 / 9760 / 75 / 10 / 6 / 19 / 6774
S.d. / 31609 / 1409 / 10 / 1919 / 13 / 4 / 5 / 10
Low density suburbs, the most numerous type of commune, exemplify the ‘rurbanised’ pattern on the fringe of metropolitan regions.[2] Communes of this type have maintained the high homeownership of agrarian communities, modest average incomes and low percentages of foreigners.
Middle class suburbs, the second largest group of metropolitan communes, have comparatively high average incomes and high rates of commuting. They also retain aspects of traditional village character, including the second lowest population densities, the second highest rate of homeownership and the second lowest proportion of foreign residents.
Poor minority suburbs correspond most closely to the popular image of the French banlieux, with the biggest immigrant concentrations, the lowest average incomes and among them the highest population densities.
Poor non-minority suburbs possess high average unemployment like their more ethnically diverse counterparts, and even lower average income as well as a lower proportion of adults with secondary education. Located largely on the rural metropolitan fringes, however, they exhibit population densities only one-fourth or lower those of poor minority suburbs.
Affluent suburbs are overwhelmingly bedroom suburbs, with 85 per cent of workers commuting outside communal boundaries to work. Predominately located within a short distance of the central city, they possess high homeownership, high rates of post-secondary education, and low unemployment.
Along with broad resemblances to parallel types in North America and other European countries in the process of metropolitanisation, this classification also reflects various patterns of clustering among the demographic indicators used in this analysis. Relations among these variables at the community level evince some of the same correlations that demographic analysis at the individual level has shown. Post-secondary education and median income correlate closely (.76, p<.001). However, ecological relationships between each of these variables and other features of communities suggest divergences that will ultimately be shown to have political consequences.[3] Place-linked characteristics of communities bear more limited relations to these measures of demographic composition. Only the Simpson Index, a three category indicator of economic diversity, manifests correlations higher than .50 with the indicators for income (.70, p<.01) and post-secondary education (.64, p<.01).[4]
Examining the Political Ecology of French Metropolitan Areas
The growth of metropolitan areas into the predominant form of settlement in France has made the characteristics of metropolitan places increasingly decisive both for national patterns of political participation and for national partisan affiliations.
Our analysis of these effects focuses on the Presidential election of April 21, 2002 and the communal elections of March 11, 2001. In each instance, the elections under scrutiny represent the first round of a two-round majoritarian electoral process.[5] The first round of the 2002 Presidential election marked the first of two successive Presidential elections in which the candidate of the Centre-right dominated candidates of the Left, and a high watermark of support for anti-immigrant, ethnonationalist parties on the Right. In the first round of voting Jean-Marie Le Pen of the right-wing National Front unexpectedly edged out Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin to win second place in the balloting. Although Le Pen lost decisively in the second round to President Jacques Chirac of the conservative Union for a Presidential Majority (UMP), the first ballot holds special interest as a window on the sources of support for the conservative formations that have dominated French politics since the 1990s and on patterns of electoral mobilisation that contributed to a surge in support for the extreme right. Metropolitan and local influences provide much of the explanation for both of these results.
Election turnout and delocalisation
The data released by the Ministry of the Interior for this study offer a comprehensive overview of election turnout as a proportion of registered voters in metropolitan areas throughout France. Turnout in both national and local elections remained high in low density and middle class suburbs, but averaged lower in urban concentrations and poor minority suburbs. Turnout gaps that fit the pattern of delocalised electoral participation were present in the affluent suburbs and central cities, and in larger metropolitan regions. In the most rural parts of French metropolitan regions, and in certain regions of the country, local turnout still exceeds national turnout. Multilevel statistical analysis allowed these relationships at various levels and the relations among them to be sorted out.
Up until the 2007 presidential election, when national turnout surged, participation of registered voters in French elections had been in decline since the 1970s (Clanché 2003). In the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, the abstention rate of 28.4 per cent represented a historical low for the Fifth Republic. In municipal elections, the decline in turnout has been more continuous, reaching an abstention rate of 32.6 per cent nationwide in 2001 and 33.5 per cent in 2008.
The analysis of this volume, along with an international literature on electoral turnout and a more circumscribed body of research on French voter participation (Hoffmann-Martinot 1992; Blais 1994), points to several clear expected findings about how patterns of turnout are likely to vary between places. The nationally uniform electoral system, the national party system, and the tightly integrated national media in France give reason to anticipate uniform patterns of turnout among localities in both types of elections. If the ecology of communities reflects the individual propensities evident from survey analysis, then the demographic composition of communities should predict participation. Higher participation rates should result from more educated and affluent residents (Dalton 2008: 63), more older residents (Dalton 2008; Niemi and Barkan 1987; Gimpel et al. 2004; Goerres 2005), fewer unemployed residents (Rosenstone 1982) and more native French residents as a proportion of the population (Tiberj 2004).
Contextual predictors of participation have rarely been tested in France. There is ample reason to suspect that the growing population of suburban homeowners, like their counterparts in the United States or Britain, will vote more often (Fischel 2001; Kingston et al. 1984). The ‘decline of community’ argument states that the low density and middle class communes should give rise to stronger solidaristic tendencies and more personal motivation to vote (Verba and Nie 1972; Hoffmann-Martinot 1992; Frandsen 2002). In rural France, local clientelism and village social networks have traditionally fostered high participation rates, particularly in the South (Kesselman 1967; Hoffmann-Martinot, Thrasher and Rallings 1996). Socioeconomic diversity, measured here by the tripartite Simpson Index based on occupational categories, has been shown to promote greater local mobilisation to vote in the United States (Oliver 2000). Various dimensions of social mobility, including the day to day mobility of commuters and frequent changes in residence, can undermine participation as well (Squire et al. 1987; Putnam 2000).
More directly political effects on turnout have received virtually no attention. Either local political competition (Oliver 2000, 2001) or local solidary effects (Bréchon and Cautrès 1987; Campbell 2006) could induce voters to participate more regularly. In small communes, rules for local elections provide additional incentives for participation and voter choice. In communes with populations under 3500, voters may choose individual candidates from the lists of candidates for council seats. In communes with populations under 2500, the lists need not include candidates for every seat and even individual candidacies are permitted. Either rule could encourage stronger ties between voters and individual local candidates, supporting the local mobilisation that has maintained high electoral participation in rural France (Hoffmann-Martinot 1992; Nevers 2002)